Seminar offers jobless advice on starting own businesses

John Reynolds works on a problem-solving exercise involving stacking and restacking differently sized items under specific rules during an entrepreneurial workshop sponsored by Workforce Solutions South Plains on Wednesday morning. The goal of the exercise, workshop leader Jim Wetherbe said, is to illustrate the difference between trial-and-error problem solving and using analytical skills.

Jim Wetherbe put his money — $5,000, to be exact — where his mouth was one morning last week, backing 10 unemployed people who think they can start their own businesses.

Wetherbe, associate dean for research and development at Texas Tech’s Rawls College of Business, put on a workshop Wednesday morning, talking with unemployment insurance recipients about what it takes to start a business.

Then he challenged the 35 people in the room to come up with their own ideas for self-employment and pitch them to the audience in a brief “elevator talk.”

The audience would vote, and the top 10 vote-getters would receive $500 each in “seed money” — Wetherbe put up his honorarium for conducting the workshop — to convert their ideas to action.

The workshop was organized by WorkforceSolutions South Plains, with support from the Lubbock chapter of SCORE, and the Small Business Development Center at Tech.

In the end, 13 people stepped forward to pitch ideas ranging from a self-service pet wash to a mobile repair business for damaged automobile wheels.

Over the course of the four-hour event, Wetherbe shared anecdotes involving business starters he knows well, including FedEx founder Fred Smith, Best Buy’s Dick Schulze and Tech alum Bobby Stevenson, a co-founder of Ciber, an information technology outsourcing and consulting firm.

In the end, Wetherbe said, entrepreneurship comes down to someone identifying a problem and then coming up with a saleable solution for that problem.

He walked the crowd back into the history of FedEx, which was known as Federal Express, and its advertising included the slogan, “When it absolutely, positively has to be there overnight.”

While FedEx started as a rapid-shipping business, Wetherbe said, the problem the company’s founder initially sought to solve was to help the Federal Reserve’s clearinghouse operations reduce the float time on checks being negotiated in the nation’s banking system.

Now, he said, the problem the company solves is “eliminating inventory” — businesses can order goods and materials on a just-in-time basis, rather than maintaining costly stockpiles of goods.

Identifying the problem doesn’t just help an entrepreneur find a business niche, he said. It also is what the entrepreneur needs to convince others to use the business or service.

That was a hint he’d drop time and again as the hopeful business starters made their pitches.

In the end, the ideas covered a broad spectrum, from in-home hairstyling with flexible hours to a tattoo safety reporting service, from refinishing wood floors to a plan to lease back-office services and working space to mechanics.

“Nobody repairs wheels here,” said Ricky Garza. “Everyone sends them to Dallas, and it takes six to eight weeks before they get back.”

He proposed setting up a mobile wheel repair business that could go to auto repair shops locally, and turn the job around for a customer in a matter of hours instead of weeks.

Meanwhile, Mike Henderson talked of grandparents and distant family members who couldn’t make a trip to Lubbock to see relatives in junior high sporting and other events, and suggested setting up a video business to record those games for people.

Part of succeeding, Wetherbe told the group, is in perseverance, explaining that FedEx’s first day in business involved 30 airplanes and only 11 packages.

The company operated for two weeks, and then temporarily shut down to rework a concept in its business plan — changing its hub airports after determining airports near large cities weren’t necessarily near cities that had companies that had large commercial cargo requirements.

In addition, he said, companies grow and expand by finding new problems to solve, and letting those solutions distinguish them from their competitors.

As other freight companies entered the overnight-shipping market, he said, FedEx was the first to develop a tracking system customers could use to find a specific package in transit.

He put the group through a problem-solving lesson, asking them to visualize three working spaces in front of them, and then to stack four objects of different sizes from smallest to largest, on the left. The goal was to stack the four objects in the right space in the same order, moving only one object at a time. Objects could move one or two spaces, and could be restacked if a smaller object was on a larger one.

The goal was to help everyone see the difference between heuristic solutions, using trial and error, and analyzing the situation before acting.